Free Vampires Through the Ages by Brian Righi

the former bishop and requested that he remove the ban so that the man’s soul might find release. At first he refused, claiming that it was a Christian matter and since he was no longer a Christian he would have nothing to do with the rites of absolution. The patriarch pleaded nevertheless, and the former bishop relented and performed the rites over the corpse of the excommunicated man, which turned to dust as soon as he was finished. Amazed by what he had just witnessed, he immediately fled to the chief magistrate of the district and related the facts as he had witnessed them. Recanting his Islamic conversion, he proclaimed aloud to all that Christianity was the true religion. Although he was warned by his fellow Turks of the consequences should he continue speaking thus, he only grew bolder in his witnessing. Eventually the former bishop was arrested and executed, but all the while he maintained his faith and was said to have died happily.
    A Double-Edged Sword
    Regardless of its value as a political tool, there were instances in which propagating the belief in vampires also meant taking responsibility for the outcome—and as with any well-sharpened sword, if not used properly the welder could find it cut both ways. In certain isolated incidents, the presence of a suspected vampire in the community was blamed on the local clergy, whose obvious curse, the villagers reasoned, had created the monster. In one story, a bishop was traveling through the Despotate of Morea when he was accosted by highwaymen on a secluded section of road. The robbers quickly relieved the bishop of all his worldly goods and made off, but before too long they began to worry that the man of faith might excommunicate them and therefore doom them to become vampires. Fearing the worst, they reasoned there was only one way to set things right, and so overtaking the bishop once again, they murdered him along the roadway.
    A more modern example occurred during the Theriso uprising on the island of Crete in 1905. A native of the municipality of Theriso became gravely ill one day, and it was assumed by many that he was the victim of a curse by the local priest. Friends and relatives of the victim threatened the priest that if he did not remove the curse and the man died that the priest would soon follow. Unfortunately, the man grew worse and died, and true to their word a group gathered before the church, dragged the hapless priest outside, and shot him to death.
    Soon after the reports of Arnod Paole and Peter Plogojowitz appeared in newspapers in the early 1700s and the vampire craze reached a fever pitch, the Roman Catholic portion of the church began to lose interest in the topic. The two cases launched a heated debate in the German Lutheran and Catholic universities as to whether vampires truly existed. Cardinal Schtrattembach, the Roman Catholic bishop of Olmütz, turned to Rome for guidance on how the vampire reports flooding in should be handled. Rome then turned the matter over to Archbishop Giuseppe Davanzati, of Trani, Italy, who had spent many years studying the problem and had written an influential work entitled Dissertazione sopra i Vampiri on the subject in 1744.
    Davanzati, like many others involved in the German debates, had taken a rather skeptical view of the topic and advised Rome that the reports emanating from Eastern Europe were a mixture of superstitious imaginings and latent pagan customs. While these influences in and of themselves may still be the work of the devil, he reasoned, the church’s true role should be directed towards the poor soul making the claims rather than the vampire itself. The church found this reasoning to be sound, and from thenceforth adopted it as policy.
    While vampires and vampirism waned among the churches of the west, they continued to find support with the Orthodox traditions of the east for some time to come. Even today, cloudy visages of its past stain the more obscure rituals of the